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Television’s portrayal of adolescence has challenged adult complacency about young people’s lives. The best coming-of-age dramas have not just shown young people behaving badly, or dangerously, or foolishly. They have asked questions about a society that leaves them to learn about sex, addiction and violence with little help.
That idea has driven shows such as Skins, Chewing Gum, Sex Education and, at its best, Euphoria. Their value did not lie in provocation alone. Drugs, humiliation and self-destruction were ways of dramatising how power affects young lives: through families, friendships, money, class and the internet. The characters mattered to audiences – and therefore so did the scandals.
That is why the turn in Euphoria’s final season feels like more than a disappointment in one programme. It suggests a broader failure in high-end television’s treatment of youth. Characters that were conflicted and vulnerable seem to have become vehicles of outrage and spectacle.
That is most clearly seen in the evolution of Cassie, played by the US actor Sydney Sweeney, who goes from being complicated and sharp to an image-obsessed OnlyFans model, so concerned with having a $50,000 floral arrangement for her wedding that she will bark like a dog and dress up like a baby to get it. The unacknowledged undercurrent is that female insecurity becomes content in the modern age.
Euphoria is a big-budget production and its stars command million dollar salaries per episode. It seems a poor cultural return and is a far cry from the gritty realism of such shows as Skins, which debuted in 2007 on Channel 4. It fictionalised young lives with rare authenticity: talking to teenagers, casting from youth clubs and discovering talents such as Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya. Yet even its own stars later criticised the show’s lack of safeguarding.
The trend in this form of drama was to aim to be more lifelike and more honest than the glossy American teen shows that came before. Netflix’s Sex Education is set in a stylised, comic-book version of a British school, yet had unexpected delicacy at times. One young woman’s sexual assault, which happens in broad daylight on a bus and involves a man masturbating next to her, is depicted so quietly that her ensuing trauma can speak more loudly.
That is why Euphoria’s descent is a worry. The change is partly aesthetic, but it is also economic. Streaming platforms and social media have altered the reward structure of television. A scene that can be clipped, argued over and circulated may now be as valuable as a story that gathers meaning over hours. Controversy becomes a form of marketing. The patient plotline that requires attention and nuance is harder to monetise. If this is what happens when a culture industry discovers that the appearance of seriousness can be sold without the discipline of serious characters and plots, then the genre may be in trouble.
Young life has frequently shocked adults. But the best television about adolescence has not stoked adult fears or teenage fantasies. It has made visible the confusion, vulnerability and moral improvisation of young people growing up in a world built by others. When such drama mistakes outrage for truth, it loses the creative spark that once made it unsettling. What artists have long known is more true here than ever: shock can start a conversation; it cannot, by itself, sustain one.
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